Tuesday, 27 July 2010

With yet another ELLIOTT match popping up in the FAIRBAIRN DNA project, it was time to explore further.
No conclusions have been reached, but anyone interested in whether or not these ELLIOTT families from mid/late 1700s Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina are actually FAIRBAIRNs, or vice versa, may be interested in the new link exploring this that has been added to the FAIRBAIRN Surname DNA project supplementary pages.

Friday, 16 July 2010

No, don't all rush for the bargain, I am talking of a claim in a military service record for the amount owing to a chap producing a requested death certificate for the army back in 1921.Measuring Worth calculates for me that the equivalent today is anything from L4.25 (using the retail price index) through to L36.70 (using the share of GDB), and L18.60 using average earnings between 1921 and 2009.
So on the retail price index version, the current L9 per certificate would appear to be rather exorbitant (however grateful I am to be able to order them up from the far side of the world), but a bargain on the average earnings calculations.

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

Over the last few days several contacts have spurred me into action on further updates to my own tree (as opposed to dna and one name study projects, the former mostly currently awaiting results from the latest sale).
Marion rang to see whether or not I'd made any progress on tracking down living descendants of Thomas Storror HULL and Ada Trimble DAVEY, one of our ROWE descendants.
Checking on where I'd got to (the last lead was a possible son for their daughter Ada Nora HULL and Leonard RAY - but that came to naught), I noticed that since then, the 1911 census is more readily available.
That resulted in a couple more children for Thomas and Ada, and a marriage for one of them, Donovan Sydney HULL, but no children immediately obvious in the English indexes, so yet another dead end.
That led me to checking a few more of Ada's siblings in 1911. None of them look like they've any living descendants, although we would love to be proven wrong.

Then Linda popped up with another researcher of one of our Margaret HENDERSON's descendants, Susan JONES nee HUTTON. Bit hard tracking JONES in Wales without help.
This led me to having another go at identifying and tracing more of (one of) the William Meikle WATTs.
Good to confirm from the 1911 census that I'd got two of this one's sons correct - and have now added a daughter Margaret into the mix, and identified which of the two brides on the same Prestwich marriage register page in 1903 was his - Eliza HALL, obligingly living at home with her father and her three children (as the expected widow, William Meikle WATT having died 1910). They now show up on the HENDERSON chart.

End result: updated family tree pages, and it must be about time I put some time into re-publishing my WorldConnect database, LornaHenderson.

But in the meantime I've been having fun linking up my tree on the NZGDB to several of the other Taranaki families represented there.
Check out the combined chart that results - registration is free.
Site may be subject to some teething problems, eg the charts I refer to are under development, work fine on my laptop but have a few problems on my desktop. Robert is investigating.
The principal is similar to One Great Family, a combined tree, but for the latter, the combination is automatic, but on NZGDB reloads of updates of your own data automatically update your data, but you have to manually link to other's trees - eg several of the "marry-ins" in my Taranaki data appear in several trees, one of which is considered an authority, so I consciously did not upload the parents with my data, and have now started checking for duplications and linking the people concerned to the other tree.
NZGDB also allows you to grant update permission to fellow researchers or relations so that you are all working on the one set of data.

Friday, 9 July 2010

A FUGE of Cornwall researcher popped out of the woodwork this week with a post in my Guestbook re two of my lot she had found in Illinois.
This does rather explain my abortive attempts at finding them in England beyond 1871.
I'd obviously not tried very hard, although my notes do say I'd tried Australia.
Samuel, and his brother John Edwin both pop up in Chicago.
As a result, given I appear not to have looked at this extended Bere Ferrers family (descendants of Hugh HAMLEY and Elizabeth, daughter of Matthias ROWE and Sarah DUNKIN, via their dtr Mary Elizabeth HAMLEY who married William FUGE) since before the 1911 became more readily available, next update my WorldConnect db LornaHenderson will have rather more details on the CORROCK family.

Thursday, 8 July 2010

My post the other day re Meikle Pinkerton elicited a prompt response from one of my RUNCIMAN cousins, chiding me for not simply asking him where it was!
I've prompted teenage memories of cycling from Edinburgh to visit his Uncle Bob (RICHARDSON) at East Barns, nearby to the Pinkertons.
Which led me to checking what I knew about East Barns, and sure enough, that was also the haunt of several (apparently different) families of RUNCIMANs over time.
One set were descendants of the Meikle Pinkerton RUNCIMAN family and living at East Barns in 1871, another the RUNCIMAN family that have a heap of descendants in New Zealand and were there in 1861.
The farm is reported as having been swallowed up by a cement works these days.

Monday, 5 July 2010

With my research on yet another branch of RUNCIMANs from Dunbar, that of Alexander RUNCIMAN and Janet HENDRIE and family, the place Mi(c)kle Pinkerton popped up in the OPRs.
My very preliminary attempts at finding such a wonderful placename didn't led me to it, and I put that thought to one side.
Reading the WDYTYA mag popped up several sites useful for place names and I decided to try again, just using Pinkerton.
The Scottish place-Name Society didn't help, but looked interesting.
However, Scotland's Places came up trumps, and armed with a more modern spelling of Meikle Pinkerton, Geograph did as well.
There's a wonderful old Doocot there,

Thursday, 1 July 2010

Noticed recently that Family Search Record Search Pilot now has Scottish Births and Baptisms 1564-1950
Much better than the IGI with its mixture of extracted and submitted data, and stopping at 1875 for extractions.
I've no idea how complete the data is, but I've successfully found some 1880s data I was looking for.